


Is This What You Wanted?

by CarryMeHome



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-15 00:51:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5765413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarryMeHome/pseuds/CarryMeHome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patrick Kane doesn’t go out with a bang or a whimper.</p><p>The summer of 2016 he went home to Buffalo, where one night he walked out into the lake and never came back.</p><p>Jonny wants a reason why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is This What You Wanted?

**Author's Note:**

> “If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.” 
> 
> ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Patrick Kane doesn’t go out with a bang or a whimper.

The summer of 2016 he went home to Buffalo, where one night he walked out into the lake and never came back.

Everyone pretends not to know why. He had the point streak and a post-season record that anyone would have been proud of. What could have possibly driven him to inhale water so swiftly and so willingly that his lungs actually burst from the pressure?

They pretend they don’t know. 

The case was open and shut, just three months of nail gnawing anxiety and misery, just three months.

But Pat’s self destructive on a good day and those days, they weren’t good.

You aren’t supposed to read the gossip rags let alone the blogs, the team psyches, veteran players, they both say it isn’t good for your head.

Jonny finds the posts.

The ones that call for the burning of Pat’s jersey, the ones that call his fans rape apologists and rape sympathisers. They say Pat has no place on the team, that he’s ruined the Blackhawks with his scandals.

No one seems to remember the up-swing, the maturity Pat was finally reaching when everything went pear shaped and shitty. They don’t remember his smile, or his charity work, or just how damn hard he worked to get to where he was.

They remember hour to hour news coverage and a swift burning hatred for all things Patrick Kane related.

This far down the road they’re still calling for him to just do them all a favor and off himself, worse they tell his fans they’re deserving of a mass suicide…

Did they know something he didn’t? 

Did they have evidence that would have proven Patrick’s guilt? If they were so sure of it, there had to be a reason right? There had to be a reason...for why they felt the need to perpetuate already painful circumstances with cruel words of their own.

There had to be a reason, a rhyme for why they thought their cruelty was necessary, why they thought fighting hatred and misconceptions with their own was a reasonable idea.

Jonny wants to ask them if they’re happy now...now that his mother has had to stand at her son’s funeral, that his sisters are without their brother, and their father no longer has a son. 

Jonny wants to ask them if this is what they really meant for when they posted time and time again calling for someone they didn’t have any personal knowledge of to take his own life.

He wants to know if this is what they meant for. If they meant for Jonny to have to walk into a morgue and stand over a slab of metal and identify his friend so his family wouldn’t have to look at his water bloated flesh, fish nibbled limbs, and empty eyes.

Would they burn his jersey in celebration? Or would they absolve him of his sins and call his death a horrible tragedy? 

Are they fucking happy now?

Jonny doubts it, but Patrick had paid his ultimate penance for a crime he didn’t commit, if that isn’t enough for them...well nothing ever would be.


End file.
